COLUMN: Chatting with rogue writer Martin Amis

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99Can I go to the railroad station?" the middle-aged man asked in a deep Oxonian twang, reminiscent of Vincent Price. Perhaps it's just his traveling persona, but the Martin Amis who stopped by Philadelphia earlier this week didn't really resemble the literary bad boy familiar to readers of the London tabloids. His dirty-blond hair, usually slicked back to emphasize his angular features, rested in a comfortable part. He did not smoke, and he wore a conservative, navy-blue overcoat. He might have been a West End accountant stateside on business. The several hundred Philadelphians who craned their necks to hear Amis speak at Borders Monday night did not seem to mind his understated appearance. "The story of literature is the history of the humiliation of our species," he told them. The Greeks wrote about gods, the Romans about demigods, the Elizabethans about kings and the "social realists" about the modern, bourgeois individual. Post-modernists like Amis write about the depraved and marginalized. Amis is sometimes called Britain's best "American" novelist. The son of novelist Kingsley Amis, he has made his mark as a flamboyant satirist, a writer of black comedy bursting with verbal virtuosity. Amis has never lived in the United States, but he takes his inspiration from postwar American writers such as Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. In 1973, at age 24, he wrote The Rachel Papers, a sort of British Portnoy's Complaint -- Philip Roth's definitive coming-of-age confessional. Like his father's first novel Lord Jim, it won the prestigious Somerset Maugham award. If Amis first gained fame as his father's heir, he has since outrun that shadow by forging a disjointed, almost surreal narrative style. In Time's Arrow -- shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, England's Pulitzer -- the disembodied, innocent soul of a dead suburban physician explores his host's life by traveling back in time, from death to birth. Seen in chronological reverse, acts of everyday virtue become evil; the doctor, for example, seems to sicken the healthy and injure the healed. Amis uses the device to achieve a peculiar insight into the atrocities of the Holocaust. The soul views the reversed actions of the doctor at Auschwitz years before -- re-inserting the ovary of a Jewish woman, for instance, or the eye of a Jewish man -- and in the process, the full horror of the initial crime becomes clear. "Career Moves" -- a story from his new collection of short fiction, Heavy Water -- imagines a world in which poets lounge by Hollywood pools chatting with their agents, while screenwriters work day jobs and slave over query letters to small, obscure journals. While Amis waited at 30th Street Station for his Northeast Direct to Manhattan and his next book reading, he bought a cup of coffee and talked literature. Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, he said, is "fiercely, instantly addictive. [But] the trouble with the 'big-picture' novel," he said, "is the second half is just sort of a hireling of the first. It just leaves you with plot chores to tie up." Amis disagrees with Wolfe's contention that modern writers disdain research, and he faults Wolfe for writing too journalistically. "Dickens was a great visitor of institutions," he said, "but his prisons and law courts are products of the imagination. It's got to come out of your own psyche and not just your notebook. It's got to be you, as well as it." Still, "the universe of fiction has many mansions, and there's plenty of room for Tom Wolfe." Amis' next project, a memoir, is his toughest yet. "I had an idyllic childhood up until adolescence, when innocence was supplanted by experience," he said. His father -- an outspoken political conservative who died in 1995 -- read only three of his son's novels and disdained the fragmented, ironic style of his son's generation. Amis finds non-fiction -- both the memoir and his journalism and criticism -- harder to write than fiction. The structure of truth-telling constrains the imagination, he says. Still, fiction tells its own kind of truth. "What you come up with in your study, what so often feels so cranky and peculiar to you, often does have some universal intent and appeal. Your own musings and interests do fan out into a wider world."